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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (58 page)

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Careful with red, said the Color Master, when I went to visit. She was thinner and weaker, but her eyes were still coals. Her brother had gotten up to try to take care of her and had thrown out his back to the worst degree and was now in the medicine arena, strapped to a board. My sister is dying, he told the doctors, but he couldn’t move, so all they did was shake their heads together. The Color Master had refused any help. I want to see Death as clearly as possible, she’d said. No drugs. I made her some toast but she ate only a few bites and then pushed it aside.
It’s tempting, to think of red, for sun, she said. But it has to be just a dash of red, not much. More of a dark orange, and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white.
White, I said. No, really?
Not bright white, she said. The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way.
Yeah, I said, sighing. And where does one find that kind of white?
Keep looking, she said.
Last time I used your hair, for silver, I said.
She smiled, feebly. Go look at fire for a while, she said. Go spend some time with fire.
I don’t want you to die, I said.
Yes, well, she said. And?
 
Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color, the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I’d heard mentioned but never experienced. So I decided it made sense to use all of those in the dress: the white, the yellow, the red, a little spot of blue. We hung the dress in the center of the room and we all revolved around it, spinning, imagining we were planets and what did we need. It needs to be hotter, said Hans, who was playing the part of Mercury, and then he put a blowtorch to some silk and made some dust materials out of that and we re-dipped the dress. Cheryl was off in the corner, cross-legged in a sunspot, her eyes closed, trying to soak it up. We need to soak it! she said, standing. So we left it in the dipping longer than usual. I walked by the bins, trying to feel that harmony feeling, what could call me, or not call me. I felt a tug to the dark brown so I brought a bit of it out and tossed it in the mix, and it was too dark but with a little yellow-white from dried lily flowers, and something started to pop a bit. Light, said Cheryl. It’s also daylight—it’s light. It’s our only true light, she said again. Without it, we live in darkness and cold. The dress drip-dried in the middle of the room, and it was getting closer, and just needed that factor of squinting—a dress so bright it couldn’t quite be looked at. How to get that?
 
Remember, the Color Master said. She sat up, in bed. I keep forgetting, she said, but the King wants to Marry his Daughter, she said. Her voice pointed to each word, hard. That is not right, she said, okay? Got it? Put anger in the dress. Righteous anger. Do you hear me?
I do not, I said, though I nodded. I didn’t say “I do not,” I just thought that part. I played with the wooden knob of her bed frame. I had tried to put some anger in the sun dress, but I was so consumed with trying to factor in the squint that all I really got in there was confusion. I think the confusion was what made an onlooker squint more than the brightness. Confusion does make people squint though, so I ended up fulfilling the request accidentally. We had sent it off in the carriage, after working all night on the light factor that Cheryl had mentioned by adding bits of diamond dust to the mix. Diamonds are light inside darkness! she’d announced, at three A.M., with a bialy in her hand, triumphant. On the whole, it was a weaker product than the moon dress, but not bad—the variance in subtlety is unnoticed by most, and our level of general artistry and craft is high, so we could get away with a lot without anyone running over and asking for his money back.
The sky, the Color Master told me, after I had filled her in on the latest. She had fallen back down into her pillows, and was so weak she spoke with eyes closed. When I held her hand she only rested hers in mine: not limp, not grasping.
Sky is last, she said.
And death?
Soon, she said. She didn’t move, with her hand on mine, and she fell asleep, midway through our conversation. I stayed all night. I slept, too, sitting up, and sometimes I woke and just sat and watched her, sleeping. What a very precious person she was, really. I hadn’t known her very well, but she had picked me, for some reason, and that picking was changing me, I could feel it, and it was like being warmed by the presence of the sun, a little. The way a ray of sun can seem to choose you, as you walk outside from the cold interior. I wanted to put her in that sun dress, to drape her in it, but it wasn’t an option; we had sent it off to the princess and it wasn’t even the right size and wasn’t really her style, either. But I guess I just knew that the sun dress we sent was something of a facsimile, and this person here was the real sun, the real center for us all, and even through the dark night, I felt the light of her, burning, even in the rasping breathing of a dying woman.
In the morning, she woke up, saw I was still there, and smiled a little. I brought her tea. She sat up to drink it.
The anger! she said, as if she had just remembered. Which maybe she had. She raised up on her elbows, face blazing. Don’t forget to put anger in this last dress, she said. Okay?
Drink your tea, I said.
Listen, she said. It’s important, she said. The King wants to marry his own daughter. She shook her head. It was written, in pain, all over her forehead. It is wrong, she said. She sat up higher, on her elbows. She looked beyond me, through me, and I could feel meaning, thick, in her. She picked her words carefully.
You cannot bring it into the world, and then bring it back into you, she said. It is the wrong action, she said.
Her face was clear of emphasis, and she spoke plainly, as plainly as possible, as if there were no taboo about fathers marrying daughters, as if the sex factor were not a biological risk, as if it weren’t just disturbing and upsetting as a given. She held herself steady, on her elbows. This is why she was the Color Master. There was no stigma, or judgment, no societal subscription, no trigger morality, but just a clean and pure anger, fresh, as if she were thinking the possibility over for the first time.
You birth someone, she said. Leaning in. You birth someone, she said. And then you release her. You do not marry her, which is a bringing back in. You let her go.
Put anger in the dress, she said. She gripped my hand, and suddenly all the weakness was gone, and she was right there, an electric pulse of a person, and I knew this was the last time we would talk, I knew it so clearly that everything sharpened into incredible focus. I could see the threads of the weave of her nightgown, the microscopic bright cells in the whites of her eyes.
Her nails bit into my hand. I felt the tears rising up in me. The teacup wobbling on the nightstand.
Got it? she said.
Yes, I said.
 
I put the anger in the dress, the color of sky. I put it in there so much I could hardly stand it—that she was about to die, that she would die unrecognized, that none of us would ever live up to her and that we were the only witnesses. That we are all so small after all that. That everybody dies anyway. I put the anger in there so much that the blue of the sky was fiercely stark, an electric blue like the core of the fire, so much that it was hard to look at. It was much harder to look at than the sun dress; the sky dress was of a whole different order. Intensely, shockingly, bluely vivid. Let her go? This was the righteous anger she had asked for, yards of it, bolts of it, even though, paradoxically, it was anger I felt because soon she would be gone.
She died the following morning, in her sleep. Even at her funeral, all I could feel was the rage, pouring out of me, while we all stood around her coffin, crying, leaning on one another, sprinkling colors from the dye bins into her hands, the colors of heaven, we hoped, while the rest of the town went about its business. Her brother rolled in on a stretcher, weeping. I had gone over to see her that morning, and found her, dead, in her bed. So quiet. The morning sun, white and clear, through the windowpanes. I stroked her hair down for an hour, her silver hair, before I left to tell anyone. The dress request had already come in, the day before, as predicted.
At the studio, under deadline, Cheryl led a seminar on blue, and sky, and space, and atmosphere, and depth, and it was successful and mournful, especially during the week after the funeral. Blue. I attended but mostly I was nurturing the feeling in me, that rage. Tending to it like a little flame candle, cupped against the wind. I knew it was the right kind, I knew it. I didn’t think I’d do much better than this dress, ever; I would go on to do good things in my life, have other meaningful moments, share in the experience of being a human being in the world, but I knew this was my big moment, and I had to be equal to it. So I sat at the seminar with half a focus, just cupping that candle flame of rage, and I half-participated in the dying of the fabric and the discussion of the various shades, and then, when they had done all they could do, and the dress was hanging in the middle, a clear and beautiful blue, I sent everyone home. Are you sure? Cheryl asked, buttoning up her coat. Go, I said. Yes. It was night, and the blue sky was unlit, and it was a new moon, so it was up to me to find the blue sky in here, only. It was draped over us all, but hidden. I went to the bins, and listened for the chords, and felt her in me. I felt the ghost of her, passing through me, as I mixed and dyed, and I felt the rage in me, that she had to be a ghost: the softness of the ghost, right up next to and surrounding the sharp and burning core of my anger. Both guided my hands. I picked the right colors to mix with blue, a little of so many other colors and then so many different kinds of blue and gray and more blue and more. And in it all, the sense of shaking my fists, at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky because that is what we do, when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all, we shake our fists at the sky, the vast sky, the big blue beautiful indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.
When the sun rose, it was a clear morning, the early sky pale and wide. I had worked all night. I wasn’t tired yet but I could feel the pricklings of it, around me, peripheral. I made a pot of coffee and sat in the chill with a cup and the dress, which I had hung again from a hanger in the middle of the room. The rest of the tailors drifted over in the morning, one by one, and no one said anything. They entered the room and looked up, and then they surrounded it with me, and we held hands and they said I was the new Color Master, and I said okay, because it was obvious that that was true, even though I knew I would never reach her levels again, but at least, for this one dress, I did. They didn’t even praise me, they just looked at it and cried. We all cried.
Esther sent off the invoice pigeon, and with care, we placed the dress into its package, and when the carriage came by, we laid it carefully over the backseat, as usual. Manny came by right before the carriage left, and he looked at an edge of fabric to see the color as we were packing it up, and he held me close. We ate our hunk of gift chocolate. We cleaned up the area around the bins, and swept the floor of dust, and talked to a builder, a friend of Manny’s, about expanding one of the rooms into an official seminar studio. The carriage trotted off, with the dress in the backseat, led by two white horses.
From what I heard, soon after the Princess got the third dress, she left town. The rest I do not know.
The rest of the story—known, I’m told, as “Donkeyskin”—is hers.
I read “Donkeyskin” many times as a kid, and what I loved most were those dresses. Inside an unsettling, provocative story—the king marrying his daughter?—was the universe revealed in fabric. What would it look like, a dress the color of the moon? It seemed this princess, in having dresses that seemed to go way beyond anything one might wear to a regular ball, was dabbling in something bigger, or had a connection to something truly magical in the kingdom. Who were these tailors and seamstresses? I didn’t think about any of this directly, but the pull to read and reread the story often had to do with the breathlessness I felt, imagining a dress the color of the sky. Which sky? Blue-sky day, or cloudy day? A cumulus cloud boa or a nimbus collar?
I feel the same when watching movies of deep-sea fish. Their unusual shapes and colors, which often do seem to resurface in fashion—ruffles that look like a kind of coral, or capes that seem to be taken straight from the black sweep of a manta ray. Clothing that reflects nature. It was great fun to spend time thinking about how those colors happened because it had to be difficult. No way that dress was just an ordinary blue.
—AB
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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